STORY ARCHIVE

Alzheimer's

There is a tragedy looming within Australia's ageing population. As more and more Australians join the ranks of the elderly, more and more will be affected by the burden of dementia... personally and through connections with loved ones. This is the story of a maverick Australian scientist whose theory about Alzheimer's has led to a breakthrough in understanding and a potential new treatment for the disease. For Prof Ashley Bush, the mystery behind Alzheimer's disease has taken him on a journey away from his early days as a medical practitioner and psychiatrist, back to the bench-top of basic scientific enquiry. His story of discovery is one of persistence in the face of opposition, culminating in the real hope of a treatment for Alzheimer's being developed right here in Australia.

TRANSCRIPT

Narration:Australia is facing an economic and social disaster.

As the population ages, the degenerative condition Alzheimer's Disease will become much more common.

For almost a century it appeared to be a hopeless condition.

But this man has some good news.

Ashley Bush:Well Alzheimer's disease has been a hopeless diagnosis since it was first described in 1906 and this has been the first year where we've actually had a drug that's capable at least in animals of stopping the disease and we've tried it out in humans with promising results so the future for the first time is looking a bit more rosy. It's like the future for St Kilda Football Club here.

Narration:A hopeless St Kilda supporter, Ashley Bush has always been a bit of a maverick and he has some radical ideas about Alzheimer's disease.

But now he might have finally found a way, to not just arrest the development of Alzheimer's disease, but possibly reverse some of it's effects.

Marie has Alzheimer's Disease. Diagnosed just 18 months ago, she's only 57 years old. It's a tragedy that effects both Marie and her husband Tom.

Tom:Well one of the very early signs was that Marie has always been a meticulous organiser and manager things, left home to go to work and left the front door wide open.

Paul Willis, Reporter:Did you notice this too Marie?

Marie: Yes, because it was the garage door that was the killer. And you know, I would come back and think, oh god know I've done it again.

Narration:More recently, as the effects of the disease have increased, Marie has lost her driving licence.

Tom: And this time it was withdrawn, and of cause that has taken away a huge degree of independence for her.

Marie: Nobody was telling me that I wasn't driving properly, but it's devastation, of not being able to go places, you know just takes so much away."

Narration:There are 150,000 Australian's like Marie, suffering from Alzheimer's Disease. And that number is rising rapidly.

This frightening statistic drives Ashley Bush toward finding a cure.

Ashley currently has two jobs, one here at the Mental Health Research Institute in Melbourne the other at Harvard University in Boston.

His year is split between the two where he focuses on the problems and potential cures for Alzheimer's

Ashley Bush: This is an image of a normal brain a normal adult brain which is enlarged and the normal size of a brain is about the same as a medium size cauliflower.

Paul Willis, Reporter: Okay so this is the healthy brain, what's wrong with this brain?

Ashley Bush: Well this is a typical Alzheimer brain from an individual of the same age. What you see here is there is basically far less meat in it.

Paul Willis, Reporter:So the brains just sort of shrunk?

Ashley Bush: Effectively its shrunk and its lost weight, so the weight of this brain would be about one half of the weight of this brain.

Narration:This disease was first diagnosed in 1906 by Dr Alois {AL-oys} Alzheimer. He conducted an autopsy on a patient and noted for the first time that the brain had shrunk. And under the microscope, he found something else.

Ashley Bush:This is an image which would be typical of what Alzheimer himself saw down is microscope nearly a hundred years ago. What you see is that accumulating within the tissue are these brown spots and in Alzheimer's disease typically the brain fills up with these deposits of this protein.

Paul Willis, Reporter:Now are these symptoms of the problem or are they the problem themselves these plaques?

Ashley Bush:Well that's a very good question you would think with something that is so dramatic that you see down a microscope that this would be the cause of the problem but the further that we looked into it the more that we saw that in fact this is a signpost of the disease rather than the cause of the damage itself.

Narration:The plaques turned out to be blobs of the protein beta amaloid.

It's a normal protein found in every healthy person.

But in the brains of Alzheimer's sufferers this protein formed abnormal blobs.

Most other researchers into Alzheimer's disease thought that the blobs were the problem - the cause of the disease.

But Ashley thought they were just the symptoms of a deeper problem.

He and his team focussed on what's inside the blobs; high doses of chemically active metals.

Ashley Bush: This is a piece of metallic copper and we found that the amaloid plaques and Alzheimer's disease typically are packed full of metals specifically copper zinc and iron. There's actually about four or five hundred percent the normal concentration of metal that you see in healthy brain tissue.

Narration:Ashley thinks that there's a connection between beta amaloid and these chemically reactive metals. Normally beta amaloid stops these metals from causing corrosive reactions in the brain.

Ashley Bush:Okay Paul well I'm doing this to show you how reactive copper is. Put it in this solution and we can watch it dissolve.

Paul Willis, Reporter:Oh yeah it's bubbling away there.

But Ashley thinks that, in the Alzheimer's brain, beta amaloid is overloaded with metals and can't stop them from corroding.

Ashley Bush:And then when that happens it generates hydrogen peroxide as a product.

Paul Willis, Reporter: Hydrogen peroxide that's bleach!

Ashley Bush:That's right it's bleach and what we knew for ages was that in Alzheimers disease it looks as if the brain has been soaked in hydrogen peroxide.

Narration:If Ashley is right, each blob in the brain of an Alzheimer's patient is a chemical factory that spews bleach throughout the living brain.

Could there be some way to stop the metals producing hydrogen peroxide?

He went searching for such a drug and found one called Clioquinol.

He then teamed up with Robert Cherney at the Mental Health Research Institute in Melbourne and together they put clioquinol {Clock-kwin-nol} to the test.

It was time for trials on mice, but these were no ordinary mice!

Paul Willis, Reporter: So what's so special about these mice?

Robert Cherney: Well these little fellas are genetically engineered to producing in their brains the same amaloide deposits as are seen in the brains of human beings with Alzheimer's disease.

Paul Willis, Reporter: So they're sort of preprogrammed to get Alzheimer's!

Robert Cherney:Yeah they're sort of they get a mousy sort of Alzheimer's disease.

Paul Willis, Reporter:How do you spot a mouse with Alzheimer's disease?

Robert Cherney:They do have um memory deficits and we put them in a maze, a water maze which they have when they get older they have a little bit of trouble solving finding the cheese if you like.

Narration:The experiment with the mice and clioquinol was conducted in Boston, but the brain samples were sent to the team in Melbourne for analysis.

Robert Cherney:It was a classical double blind study. And when they sent the brains over to us they didn't let us know which had the treatment which had not. We analysed the tissue we had a look to see how much of the amaloid was in there and then we sent the results back to them saying Mouse A had this amount, Mouse B had this amount and they went back to their list they opened up the envelope so to speak.

Narration:And, when the results came through, they were stunning!

Robert Cherney:I was about to go to bed and I got this phone call, and my wife said it's actually from Harvard and I said what's this all about. And he said, it worked! And I said what worked the clioquinol it worked and it was really really exciting time. I really didn't sleep after that.

Ashley Bush:This is some of the most important results that we ever achieved. This mouse that is treated with the placebo, so it's received no active drug. And you see the brown spots are the typical amaloid that you see down microscope, and which is typical of Alzheimer's disease. The upper panel is the same type of mouse that has been treated for only twelve weeks with this drug clioquinol and you see there is no brown spots what so ever.

Paul Willis, Reporter:So is the reversal of the situation, or just prevented the situation from starting.

Ashley Bush:This is a reversal, because at this age all of these animals have abundant brown spots in them.

If this compound is as effective in humans as it is in mice, we hope to stopped the deterioration associated with the disease, and then we give the brain a chance to repair itself.

Narration:Limited human trials have, so far, produced promising results. But, as encouraging as the initial results of these trials appear to be, the fact is that most existing Alzheimer's patients may have already lost too much.

Tom:It's a, it's a gut retching experience. And because it is a slow and degenerative process, it's takes a little bit away from you, everyday. Millimetre by millimetre, centimetre by centimetre, you can feel the grief come through you.

We are squeezing every good moment out of everyday that we can. We're grateful for all the time we have together. We're grateful for good sunny days, and fresh breeze. But we realise that the really really hard days, are yet to come.

Narration:Ashley's research offer's some hope for the future, for people who have yet to develop Alzheimer's disease.

However larger scale tests are needed before his unconventional ideas will be fully accepted by other medical researchers.

But it is a rare glimmer of hope for a future that otherwise looks very bleak.

Ashley Bush:The number of people in Australia currently with Alzheimer's disease is about a hundred and fifty thousand and so that's about four times larger than the number of people who are currently at this stadium but by the year two thousand and fifty there will be half a million Australians with Alzheimer's disease and that's why we've got to get on top of it as soon as we can we can't waste time about this because its going to come down on us like a social meteorite.

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Rachel Castle - 09 Nov 2011 4:39:52am

As I said before about my mother, and quite sorry for commenting again. But I just really need an answer. My mother's seizures are beggining to worsen. And I know the body is a mysterious thing, exspecially the brain. I just really need to know, She has a brown spot on her Hypothamus gland, and one cause of seizures is a chemical reaction in the brain. And from my understanding so are alzheimers spots. And Ive been told that alzheimers usally occur on the temporal lobe. But could an oddity occured and one appeared on my mom's hypothalamus gland? Could this be the cause of her seizures? The Temporal lobe effects memory and monay other things, whereas the hypothalamus affects movement, muscle function, and other things. So please, someone help me, could this be what happened to my mom?

Rachel Castle - 28 Sep 2010 12:25:23pm

I`m Rai and i`m 12 i have been looking up on the causes of seizures because my healthy 33 year old mother started to have grand mal seizures last summer without any warning she had a MRI and they found a brown spot on her brain and i was wondering if the beta almaloid could be a factor of her having seizuers since the spot on her brain is too deep for them to realy do anything without the risk of being mentaly disabled for the rest of her life

Robert J Goode - 11 Feb 2009 11:17:05pm

I am 68 yoa and my wife of almost 50 years has been in a Nursing Home with Alziemers ..dementia and Bi-Pola disorders.over the 8 months she has been in the N/H her moods have made feel a mix of feelings .Such as I think they have got it wrong,and I want her back home.Then it becomes so obvious in the course of a single visit that that is wrong she wont ever be coming home.It is so confusing and a careful management of the thoughts within the family has caused some real concerns.As a family the visits are spread out now so the grief is covered more easily and this appears to provide a more even account of the situation she is in.What we see is that the mood swings are contained in such away that the doubt of us being conned has been put to one side.This allows us to speak as a front with her which seems to work in comforting her.There have been many outbursts but not the kind that distroys an individual.It is hard to establish a pattern with my wife as she has always been a n upfront person.The times we have talked in what seem to thenormal conversations where plans are made only to the next visit to be mey with a blank look,is or was or has been devistating so many times.The reading of the programes is very helpful and I feel the back in support groups is so needed that I was moved to write this.Thank you ABC.Bob Goode New boy on the block.

Dianne Lloyd - 24 Sep 2008 3:56:24pm

Hi, I wish to have the test done to determine if I have early signs of Alziemers, as both grandmother and mother have developed this disease. Many thanks,Dianne Lloyd

L. Binder, Ph.D. - 29 Sep 2008 2:44:43pm

Hello Dianne,

Even if there was a real test for Alzheimer's Disease, it won't help much since there isn't a cure or a medication to treat the disease.L.B.